Sedona Law 4 by Dave Daren (ready to read books TXT) 📕

was already there. She wore a long green trench coat, and her short red bobbed hair was under a green cap.

“Hello, Judith,” I greeted her and set my bag down. “Nice to see you so early in the morning.”

“Yes,” she said hurriedly. “I came to talk to you about the case.”

“Right,” I said. “Without your own lawyer present, are you sure you want to do this?”

“I’ve got nothing to lose,” she said.

“Okay,” I said and motioned to the conference room. “Let’s chat back here.”

“Sure,” she said.

Landon had taken over our conference room as his office and was spread out everywhere.

“Judith, I presume?” Landon asked.

“Yes,” she said. She was softer spoken than I had seen her in the past, and I wondered if she was on psychiatric medication.

“This is Landon,” I said. “He’s taping a lot of our interviews, do you mind if he gets this on film?”

“Not at all,” she said.

I shrugged to Landon, who already had the tape queued up. He jumped up, pushed a button, and then stood against the wall and watched.

“So, tell me,” I said. “What can we do for you?”

“I told the truth about Beowulf, and the police don’t believe me,” she said. “I don’t know what to do, because this poor girl is going to jail for it.”

“Julianna Spencer?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “No one believes me, and I’m willing to testify in court.”

“You are saying,” I motioned toward the camera, “that you killed Beowulf Vandergarten?”

“Yes,” she said and looked directly at the camera. “I did.”

I nodded, not quite sure what to make of this. It was all so emotionless. I had dealt with murder confessions, and the suspect is usually so consumed with guilt that they are very emotional. Unless I was dealing with a true sociopath, there was something fishy about this. I could see now why the police and prosecution had a difficult time with her confession.

“Tell me what happened,” I said.

“Well,” she said. “The night of the murder, I was at the performance hall to protest the group. I felt very strongly about their content and showed up with my activist group to protest the performance.”

“Right,” I said as I narrowed my eyes at her robotic tone. Her words were too carefully chosen and sounded well-rehearsed. “There is quite a bit of video footage of you on that night.”

“I felt very angry that I wasn’t being taken seriously,” she said. “I felt that the group represented everything that is wrong with the way women are treated.”

“You made your position quite clear that night,” I said, and I tried to wrap my head around what she was telling me, with what I knew of her secret deeds with John Malone. But, I wanted to get her full murder confession out of the way before I deflated its premise.

“Tell me about the crime itself,” I prodded.

I wasn’t going to sit here and listen to her ramble on about her conflicting feminist ideology.

She looked down at the table and then took a deep breath. “I snuck backstage to confront the dancers. I thought if I could get them to listen to me, I could stop the performance.”

“How did you get backstage?” I asked.

“I snuck in through a window,” she said.

“Which window?” I asked.

“One of the ones in the dressing rooms,” she replied.

“Which dressing room?” I responded.

“I don’t know how to describe it,” she said. “But, it was where one of the girls was.”

“Which girl?” I asked.

“Her name was... Olivia... I think?”

I chuckled. And we uncover two lies in one. She knew Olivia very well, and there was only one dressing room with a window, and it was the one Beowulf was in. I cleared my throat and texted AJ in the other room. Did we ever get the floor plans for the PAH?

“Had you ever seen Olivia before?” I asked Judith.

“No,” she said.

“To clarify, you had never met her, talked to her, seen her...” I clarified.

“No,” she said. “I had never seen her before in my life. I just wanted to talk to her about what she was doing, degrading herself for the sake of art, it’s just--”

“Yeah,” I interrupted. “So you snuck into Olivia’s dressing room, through the window. What was she doing when you got there?”

AJ texted me back. Yes. I downloaded them. I have them in my research files.

“She was... doing her hair,” Judith said.

“Was she alone?” I asked.

Can you bring them in here? I texted AJ.

“Yes, she was alone,” Judith said.

“You snuck into Olivia’s dressing room, through the window, and she was alone doing her hair?” I repeated her details back to her.

Judith shifted in her seat. “Yes, that’s what I said.”

“Is that what you said, or is that what happened?” I asked.

AJ popped in, and I grabbed the papers out of her hand. I quickly smiled at her, and she left.

“That’s what happened,” Judith insisted.

I looked over the floorplans and tried to find the backstage view.

“Go on,” I said. “What happened once you got into Olivia’s dressing room?”

“I tried to talk to her about what she was doing, and tried to explain that she could have a better life outside of what she was doing,” Judith said.

“And how did she respond?” I asked.

“She left the room,” she said. “I assumed she planned to alert security, so I saw these cans of green paint sitting in the dressing room. And I’m not proud of what I did next, but I lost my temper and began tossing the paint at the dancers.”

And that’s the thing she wasn’t proud of?

“Was this before or after the show?” I asked.

I already knew the answer to this, but I wanted to line